


You Can't Save Anyone

by DjaqtheRipper



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-02-08 23:16:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1959834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DjaqtheRipper/pseuds/DjaqtheRipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will survives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All and any feedback much appreciated.

This is one way of reaching rock bottom: finally accepting that you can’t save anyone from this beautifully monstrous world. The realization comes with Abigail’s blood spurting through Will’s grasping fingers, comes with the sick twist of exposed large intestine against his trapped hand. The acceptance of the futility of salvation should bring peace. With every struggle- the knife in his shoulder in Louisiana, the bullet in his arm in Wolf Trap, the acid taste of secondhand betrayal on his tongue right now- he has wondered if the best thing to do would be to stop struggling. Let be. He wonders if he would do less damage if he stopped trying to save people, but of course he wonders this too late, wonders it with blood escaping his shaking hands. Alana, for all her strength, for all the power of her mercy, is a collection of splintered bones and torn organs on the pavement outside. The volume of blood swelling out of the pantry door indicates that Jack is no better. Abigail is still beside him, dying as she had once survived, the teacup coming together, time reversing so that she could die as she was destined to die. They had all trusted him, followed him on the path to perdition. Will could not save anyone, and finally understood that he was a fool to try. So, with no witnesses to this last betrayal, to this acceptance that has come far too late, he lets go of the daughter he failed, lets her carotid arteries spill their contents unhindered. He stops trying to push his insides back inside and lets go, giving his body leave to sink to the floor, giving his extraordinary mind leave to destroy itself, granting himself permission to die. Death seems to be a fitting punishment. Judas died by his own hand after his famous betrayal. It seems fitting that Hannibal’s linoleum knife had come close to enacting seppuku- a just punishment for the shame of betrayal. An honorable end. He expects to sink further into darkness, to let it seep into his skin, drown him slowly and peacefully. He closes his eyes. He does not conjure a stream to wade into, does not allow himself this mercy. He feels the darkness lapping at him, feels it in the lack of feeling in his numb fingers and toes, feels it in the dry cavity of his mouth, his throat. He waits.


	2. Upon Waking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal is captured.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: a few lines taken almost if not entirely directly from the books/ show/ movies.

Through a haze of white walls and the drone of countless machines and the blur of fluorescent lights, Will realizes he is alive. Through the atmospheric hospital fugue he is informed that Abigail is not, that he is not permitted to attend her funeral services, that the families of Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ victims are rallying at her grave. The blow is eased by the time Will had to mourn her the first time she died. Alana had been disputably more lucky- her spine snapped at the T7 vertebra, leaving her paralyzed from the chest down. Will wonders idly if it chafes for such a skilled doctor to undergo psychotherapy at the hands of an undoubtedly inferior member of her profession. He thinks sometimes when he can’t sleep about the loss of her power, about the sorry shriveled future of her beautiful legs he’s never touched. Jack has survived, has only been enlivened by the drawing of first blood, by his brush with mortality. Jack now surges forward with an obsessive ruthlessness bordering on mania, meanwhile making faux-somber press statements about the tragic loss of the sacrificial lamb Abigail had served as, more genuine regrets for Dr. Bloom’s injuries, trying to get Will’s feedback on the hunt for Lecter while trying to pretend that isn’t what he’s doing.

Will Graham is numb, but for dreading the loss of numbness. There is a neat row of sutures along his abdomen. Sometimes, when he is meant to be asleep, he prods at them through the bandages, as if feeling banal physical pain will allow him to postpone feeling anything else. He does not know how much time has passed when Jack comes, only that the stitches are mere days from being removed, going off of the new skin Will feels when he pokes his index finger under the gauze. Jack reeks of smugness like cheap cologne (like terrible aftershave, with a ship on the bottle that he buys for himself because for just a moment every morning it allows him to think of pirates and secondhand childhood rather than the hovering omnipotent miasma of the monsters lurking just out of sight but never entirely out of mind) his eyes glowing like traffic lights after a car accident. Jack sits in the visitors chair, which emits a plastic creak when he leans forward, physically unable to contain his excitement.

“Will,” he says, voice steady through a smile like the cat that caught the canary, “we caught him.” 

He says more after that, important thing like how they snared the great hunter, and all the security measures on his cell, and the fans crawling out of the woodwork, but Will honestly cannot remember a word of it. 

Time slips, not in the way of encephalitis but in the way that it does when a massive amount of adrenaline hits the bloodstream and sends every muscle, every nerve into such tension that all things beyond the immediate danger- all things, including time itself- fades away, forgotten, as the body tries desperately to keep you alive just another heartbeat longer. Will’s heart pounds in his ears, drowns out Jack Crawford, and the machines, and the nurses. In the quiet of lights out his pulse is deafening. He can hardly breathe, feels like he’s drowning in his own blood, the hot slick rush of it roaring in his ears. He wants it to drown him. He wants to die like he should’ve on Hannibal Lecter’s floor. He wiggles his index finger between sterile bandage and sweat-slick flesh and tugs the fabric loose by minute increments. The raised line of stitches is warm, almost feverish with the effort of healing. Will’s nails- grown long during his hospital stay- dig persistently under the black thread. The delicate new skin beneath is easily broken. Slowly, agonizingly, Will tears out his stitches, splitting apart his wound. He knew when the doctors sewed it up that it was not the kind of injury you ever recover from. The work finished, the gaping gash oozing viscera over his fingers, Will accepts his punishment. This is an intimate death of an entirely different nature- a belated acceptance of the sweet and harsh goodbye offered previously. This time, Will knows well enough to accept the mercy he had then rejected. He rests his head on the antiseptic stink of the hospital pillow. He wades into the quiet of a stream.


	3. Broad Strokes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is Francis Dolarhyde, and Buffalo Bill, and Mason Verger, and eventually the universe contracts and Mischa Lecter is born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basically, super super condensed version of the events of Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, but with background stuff and Will (cause Will isn't in the latter two) and the introduction of what will become the premise of the story.

Time slips away. Jack concedes to time’s passage and puts his latest broken pony’s dogs in a kennel while Will atrophies in a psychiatric ward until such time as he is deemed stable. His instability allows him to avoid the circus of the Hannibal the Cannibal trial, allows him to stay locked away in the hospital until Hannibal is locked away for life, at which point Will get himself declared sane and leaves. He wonders if the simplicity of fixing boat motors is enough to ease a broken mind. He moves to Florida to find out. He builds himself a new pack and pretends that they’re all the company he needs. He pretends believably enough- not that there’s anyone to appreciate the act, since Jack gave up asking for help on cases and Alana stopped writing, saying that Will made her too sad- until he meets Molly.

Molly who offers a forgiveness that no one else can, Molly who radiates warmth, humanity. Molly who holds him tight when the dreams come, Molly whose lips trace the scars Will tries to hide, Molly who scratches the dogs behind the ears while she watches television. Molly, who brings her son Willy and gives Will the family he has always wanted. He teaches Willy to fish, ruffles his hair when he reels in his prize, reads him adventure stories until he falls asleep each night, and is rewarded with gap-toothed smiles and lanky, jabbing hugs, and the incalculable gift of Willy slipping and calling Will “dad.” It is so much better than he could have dreamed, even with his considerable imagination, than the web of lies (the harsh, secret, doomed love) that held Hannibal and Abigail to him, the collection of cells scraped out of Margot Verger. He is, for the first time he can remember, happy. Stable. 

Will marries Molly, tears up while she reads her wedding vows, smiles for pictures, awkward only in his exuberance, the whole time waiting for it to fall apart. He goes to work and expects to come home to beloved corpses and Jack Crawford’s eager expression schooled into one of condolence. He waits, but each day his family is alive and well, greeting him with the unconditional affection he had only received from his pack of strays. Will holds them close and loves them like drowning, with a hungry gratefulness gnawing at his stomach and the sweetly acrid taste of fear in his mouth.

Dr. Lecter- for it is Dr. Lecter now, Dr. Lecter with his water-slicked hair and his felt pens and his Velcro shoes, locked up in an impenetrable fortress miles and miles away, not Hannibal who could look at Will with warmth pooling in his eyes, not Hannibal who saw Will at his worst and saw a man rather than a monster- sends him a letter. He considers it over four shots of whiskey then burns it unopened. Molly doesn’t mention it, simply puts the bottle away and kisses his forehead.

Then there are the Leeds and Jacobi families, and the Francis Dolarhyde, and Reba McClane. There is Dr. Lecter, a shadow of what he once was, turned manic around the edges where the confinement chafed. Will earns a new scar- a thick gash that runs over the right side of his face. (I hope you won’t be too ugly, Dr. Lecter writes.) He sees the price for dragging Molly into the world he tried so hard to leave behind: she leaves him, taking Willy with her to Willy’s grandparent’s house, where Will was always unwelcome anyway. He remembers, achingly, Lecter’s (but back then he was just Hannibal, back then they just had conversations without the pretense of therapy, the pretense of guards and two layers between prisoner and visitor) response to being dragged down the rabbit hole: “I got here on my own, but I appreciate the company.” Then Will drinks until he can’t remember anymore. 

Jack asks for help catching a killer making a woman suit, but Will’s deteriorated into a perpetual slur, perpetually shaking hands, and Jack doesn’t press. Will laughs bitterly about what it took to finally break Jack Crawford’s favorite pony. Jack, as per his modus operandi, simply puts another protégé on the job. That protégé is Clarice Starling, and she is successful: for the moment her future is promising.

Lecter escapes. Will sits in a dark house reeking of dog excrement with a bottle of Southern Comfort waiting for Death in a three piece suit to find him. True to form, Lecter leaves Will to his misery, leaves him to long days of work where his employers are fully aware of the tremors in his hands and the flask that he sips from during his lunch break, but continue to employ Will Graham because he is still punctual enough that they cannot justify firing him. There are many nights where Will takes out his gun and presses it to his temple, skin flushed with whiskey, and wonders if he should pull the trigger. He thinks that he has survived too many times at the hands of others to want to die by his own. He begins to long for Hannibal Lecter to return and finish what he started. He uses the newspaper code shared by Lecter and the Red Dragon to ask if Lecter can hurry up and kill Will already. Lecter sends him a letter instead. This letter includes a P.O. box in London. From there it will be forwarded to another P.O. box, and from there to a third P.O. box where Hannibal will have one of his staff pick it up. Will sells his gun and sends a letter.

Seven years pass. Hannibal Lecter enjoys his freedom with a zeal only possible in those who have been without freedom. Clarice Starling watches her career be destroyed, its ruin abetted by Paul Krendler, and begins to look for Hannibal Lecter. Their eyes meet for the first time in almost a decade across Mason Verger’s bloodthirsty pigs. They escape. Mason Verger does not, dying at the hands of his sister Margot, who steals from him the seeds for an heir. Over a dish of Paul Krendler’s brain sautéed with caper berries, Clarice Starling gives up good and evil, choosing instead to eat the rude. 

Hannibal wonders if, should the universe contract and a broken teacup spring back into wholeness, Clarice Starling’s place in the world could be occupied by Mischa Lecter. 

Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter correspond via handwritten letters, Hannibal’s calligraphy and Will’s scrawl. Hannibal’s letters have no incriminating details, not that Will would incriminate Lecter; the loss of Will’s family created in him a deep loathing of the FBI. Instead, the two discuss morality, history, the many beauteous and monstrous aspects of man. They discuss the darkness they both harbor. They offer each other therapy that they cannot find anywhere else, and it is indeed therapeutic. Under the long-distance care of Dr. Lecter, Will stops drinking. The alcohol had served to block out the past. By accepting the past, Will finds his own freedom. In the blind loneliness his life has become, Will clutches desperately to this link with his former friend, the only person who had truly understood the darkness that consumed Will and cared for him because of, rather than in spite of, it. Will knows that it is not healthy to crave the friendship of the serial killer who had partially disemboweled him and was responsible for the destruction of every family Will had ever made for himself. Will knows this isn’t healthy. He does not care.

Two years after Starling and Lecter marry, the universe contracts and a child is born. They name her Mischa.

Will receives another letter, with a small photograph of a newborn. The baby has light hair and eyes a shade of maroon which Will has only seen on one other person. The letter informs Will that, in the event that Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling die, are incarcerated, or are in some other way made unable to care for their child, they have named Will Graham her legal guardian. Will, throat tightening painfully as he remembers bedtime stories and fly fishing and ruffling hair, thanks them for the honor and asks for more pictures.


	4. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time passes for Will, but not in conventional units.Then comes a phone call that tears the universe apart.

Time passes, but for Will Graham it is not measured in conventional units. The years pass in the moments captured in film, covering his refrigerator.   
Graham receives a thicker than ordinary envelope in the mail, one of the anonymous business envelopes Clarice favors. In it, in addition to a letter from Clarice (still with a degree of hero-worship for the legend of Quantico, for the man whose work she’d studied at the Academy) there are strips of photo negatives from the kind of cheap, disposable camera sold to tourists from major drugstores the world over. He wonders how it must pain Hannibal to capture his beautiful daughter on such inferior machines. He knows there must be sketches, wrought lovingly in graphite, in charcoal. He hopes to see them in person. Better yet, he hopes to see the child in person. He knows these dreams yield no fruit, and so settles for the offered photo negatives, which are still more than he could have imagined.   
Before he leaves for work in the morning, Will slips the negatives in the metal lunch pail he keeps his food in. As he works his eyes drift to where his prize is hidden. He counts the minutes to lunch. When he is dismissed for his break, he walks to the Rite Aid nearest the boat shop and heads to the back counter, where they offer 1 hour developing services. Dolarhyde has made him cautious. He stays in the store, eating his sandwich and nursing a cold bottle of Coca Cola. No one bothers him, half out of pity and half out of fear. He is still frightening-his beard thick over massive facial scarring, his eyes downcast like a dog kicked one too many times, but he never does anything too suspicious, never does anything to warrant their fear.  
When the pictures are ready Will can’t look, puts them in the back pocket of his jeans.  
“Cute kid,” the cashier smiles.  
“My niece, Will lies without meeting her eyes, accepts his change, and returns to work.   
He can sense the pictures in his pocket the rest of the day, the lone spot of warmth in a world that has become far too cold and uninviting. At six o’clock he leaves the shop with nods to his coworkers, trying not to imply anything out of the ordinary. They nod in return, go back to the sedate grumblings of the comfortably middle-aged. The drive home is silent, but the car seems to hum with anticipation, as though it radiates off Will and has to settle in the car around him. The house is clean now, smelling only faintly of dogs (his pack reduced to three now). Will has fallen out of the habit of locking the door, but he remembers to close it. He flicks on the kitchen lights, sits in the lone, scarred chair at the kitchen table, and sets the photos in front of him with a care bordering on reverence.   
In the pictures before him, ten month old Mischa in a cotton dress teeters on uncertain feet. Her light hair has been pulled back, out of harm’s way. Her face is smeared with finger paint and she smiles gleefully, exposing toothless gums, delighted to have made such a mess. Her crimson eyes twinkle with joy. Will finds himself grinning back at the photo, as he considers how strong a drive rebellion may become, given the necessary constraints around Mischa’s each and every action.   
For now, though, she appears as worry-free as any innocent child.   
Hannibal and Clarice are safely out of frame, casting no shadow of suspicion upon the pictures of their daughter. Mischa is unknown to the world, and captured like this she could be anyone’s child- even, god forbid, Will’s actual niece. The pictures in no way imply a connection to Hannibal the Cannibal.  
Each subsequent set of pictures Will receives is similarly untelling. They almost appear as stock photos- a toddler chasing a flock of pigeons in a nameless city somewhere in the world, the same toddler slightly grown holding the leg of a well-loved stuffed horse. Clarice and Hannibal make their presence known through absence. As he hangs new photos on his fridge he longs to see their faces, open and smiling, removed from the context of police photos and newspaper clippings. Instead, he makes do with countless photos of their child at play and the long, careful letters tucked away in a box in his nightstand.   
In this way, the years pass.  
The smiling toddler grows in height, her smile stretches as teeth fill in her open gums. There are new pictures of her in school clothes, riding a tricycle, utterly focused as she draws with colored pencils.   
Then, there is a picture of what is clearly intended to be a mismatched group of dogs, though the artist has chosen to render it in truly lurid shades of green. In a careful, familiar script in the corner: We told her that her Uncle Will has a dog pack and she decided to draw you one. Will unfolds it tenderly, buys a dollar store frame to hang it in. It is the first thing he sees when he returns in the evening, and it makes him feel more at home than anything else in the empty house.  
When Mischa can write, she sends letters, her handwriting clumsy and juvenile, the graphite smudged. Nonetheless, her grammar and spelling are immaculate, though her sentences are short and non descriptive. She talks about school, and her friends, and climbing trees in their yard. Her letters address her “Uncle Will.” Will keeps the most recent in his wallet to look at throughout the day, to drink in the warmth they carry across time and space.  
Hannibal’s letters contain warmth of a different variety.  
My dear Will, he writes, the world has changed, and has remained unchanging. The universe is as callous as it ever was, and its callousness grants strange power. Clarice can kill those who deserve death and still dream of the screaming of the lambs. There will always be those we cannot save, and yet the universe contracts and returns to us our loved ones whole, unbroken. We are given the opportunity to be stronger, to be faster, to do what we could not before. Who would you have returned to you, given the choice?  
Now, Will thinks, he would want Abigail returned to him. He would want his daughter back.  
Then with a single phone call the tentative happiness Will has built for himself falls to pieces. This single phone call comes from someone Will hasn’t spoken to since the last time his life fell apart.  
“Hello, Will,” the voice on the other end says.  
“Jack.”  
“I’m going to give you one chance and you’d better take it.” The voice has grown older but has not shifted or weakened with age.   
“What are you asking for?” Will says.  
“Hannibal Lecter,” Jack demands, and the universe crumbles.


End file.
